Kenyan-born Minnesota lawmaker Huldah Momanyi barely had time to celebrate her re-election before boarding a plane back to her roots. She won her seat for District 38A on a Tuesday, and by Thursday she was already in the air headed to Nairobi.
Speaking to Radio Generation Kenya on “The People’s Breakfast” programme, Momanyi explained that the trip was not simply a homecoming, though she acknowledged needing to decompress after a gruelling election season.
“I will always be grounded in who I am as a Kenyan. I’m very proud Kenyan-American,” she told the host.
Minnesota’s looming nursing crisis The core purpose of her visit, she said, was an economic trade initiative in the healthcare space that has been years in the making.
The groundwork was laid by Kenyan-American Dr Abila Kumar and Representative Mahamud Noor, a Somali-Kenyan lawmaker, before Momanyi stepped in to lead the current delegation of 14 healthcare providers.
Minnesota is facing a serious staffing crunch in its healthcare sector. Momanyi cited projections showing the state will be short of 30,000 nurses alone by 2030, a figure that does not account for nursing assistants and other support staff needed to run its facilities.
She attributed the pressure partly to Minnesota being an ageing state with growing demand for care services.
A pilot programme already underway Momanyi’s delegation met with Kenya’s Ministry of Health, and she was photographed with Dr. Oluga during those engagements.
The discussions centred on how Minnesota can recruit Kenyan nurses while also reinvesting into the communities those nurses come from, addressing concerns about brain drain.
“How do we also invest back here to combat that whole idea of brain drain? Can we bring back resources, technology, information sharing that can help the populations of where we are getting these nurses?” she said during the interview.
A pilot programme was already run in September this year, when a group of Kenyan nurses travelled to Minnesota and were successfully placed in facilities.
The next step, Momanyi said, is scaling the initiative from a trial phase into a fully operational programme.
